Or Chadash (A New Light)
by TzviaAriella
Summary: JEWISH AU. Retired detective Lior Lawliet, formerly known as L, reflects on his childhood, his career, and his final case—and how a brilliant young murderer, Yair Agami, changed his life forever. (A glossary/cultural guide is included at the end of each chapter.)
1. Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

To understand me, you must first know this: to me, every man is predictable.

I don't mean that as a brag, or in a sexist sense. (Women hold no great mystery either, however much men pretend they do.) I merely state a fact. There are few people alive who can surprise me, and only one–now dead–who could ever do so routinely. To those with the gift of deductive insight, the most complex man is no more than a puzzle, a jigsaw jumble of habits, phobias, principles, and quirks. Even I, former detective that I am, can be deconstructed, though I lack the objective distance to do so myself. All people are predictable. It's a galling thought, but true.

Take you, for example. When I mentioned I was a former detective, one of two questions sprang to your mind: "Why a detective?" or "Why did you quit?" I know this because everyone I have ever mentioned my past career to has asked me one or both. I don't mind. In truth, I ask myself those questions, too. But in both cases, the answer is the same: it began with a murder.

In the former case, the victim was my mother, gunned down on my front lawn when I was nine. Yes, before you ask, I saw it happen. My father's shouting woke me, and I came down the stairs to find him drunk, waving a shotgun out the front door. I wish I could say it surprised me, but my father was more predictable than most. He was always drunk, often violent, and all but welded to his guns. It didn't take a great detective to predict he would one day go too far. When I saw the distant figure crumple and collapse on the grass, I felt no shock. Merely relief. It wasn't me.

Know this: I am not sentimental.

You may assume I became a detective in my mother's memory, to erase the past by saving others in her place. That is untrue. Though she gave birth to me, the woman on the lawn was a stranger, having fled my father when I was two. My father later claimed she came back that night for me, to take me away from him for good. It makes a certain sense, and I would certainly like to believe him. In truth? I'll never know. If I prove wrong–unlikely–and there is in fact an afterlife, I may seek her out and ask her. Though there's another I would have to seek out first.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

If she truly did come back to save me, she succeeded. Thanks to her death, I was at last freed of the belts and blows and cigarette burns my father called parenting, though not of the guilt that came from loving him. "How could you love such a man?" you will ask, and I don't have an answer. It simply is. But you may find it interesting that I continued to use my father's nickname for me long after my adoption, to the point that entire governments–the entire world–once knew me by that name alone. Not by the name my mother gave me, Lior, or even by my surname, Lawliet, but simply as _**L**_. My father's son. Nothing more.

It was also the circumstances of my mother's death that caught the eye of the media–and, in turn, of Quillish Wammy, the wealthy philanthropist, who saw me interviewed and was moved to take me in. I would like to say he became the father to me my own father had failed to be, but again: I am not sentimental. Mr. Wammy gave me food, four walls, and a future, but he was never truly warm, and it was never truly mine. In his eyes, he was my savior, and he expected my gratitude and obedience as he might expect an eastern sunrise. I was never his son, merely an exotic pet–albeit one capable of interesting tricks. It was he who first discovered what I could do, he who suggested I become a detective. Strange as it seems, I would never have thought of it on my own.

Don't get the wrong idea when I say "suggested," by the way. There was no choice involved. Mr. Wammy paid for my education, my equipment, and–I suspect–my publicity, his money opening doors where my freakish intelligence alone could not. Not once did he ask my opinion. Each time, he would tell me what he had done after the fact, assuming I would go along with whatever he decided. I always did. I may have the finest mind this world has yet produced–an observation, not a brag–but I, too, am predictable.

Know this: I am only human.

That said, he was kind to me, and the work was appealing. For the first time in my brief life, I had the stimulation I craved and the freedom (within limits) to choose my own course. I regret nothing of those years, nothing at all. I have never been prone to real happiness, but as a detective I was…content. For a time.

Until the second murder.

If my mother was a stranger, this murder's victim was even more so. His name was David Dern, and he was not much grieved for. His life's work was giving speeches on how the Jews were corrupting the nations of the world, a subject on which he had also written several controversial books. For all his notoriety, however, he was very much alone. After the heart attack that felled him, his body went undiscovered for three weeks.

I found it hard to empathize. My father hated Jews with the same bitter, open hate he gave to blacks, Latinos, gays, Muslims, the government, and his own son–who was, I should add, a Jew himself, though my father certainly never informed me. Only after my mother's ill-starred visit revealed her identity to me did I learn of my own heritage, and even then it became a mere footnote in my view of myself. Neither my father nor Mr. Wammy were Jewish, after all, and I have little personal use for faith. Nonetheless, I felt some kinship, distant as it was, with the Jewish people, and both my conscience and self-interest barred me from any sympathy for their—our—enemies.

But a murder was a murder, and Dern was not the first. For weeks, public antisemites had been dropping dead at unbelievable rates, including two Fortune 500 CEOs, a prominent Hollywood actor, a foreign head of state, and any number of self-published authors, Klan members, and low-level politicians. Though the deaths appeared natural, it didn't take a great detective to suspect foul play. By the time Dern's impatient landlord smelled rot and broke through his front door, the media had already proclaimed a new serial killer at work: the Golem. Who this Golem was, or even how he killed, no one could say. Like his namesake, he was the stuff of legend, a living myth–or, as I chose to see him, a challenge.

I had been torn over taking the case, but the photos of Dern's decomposed body convinced me. I couldn't walk away. Much as I loathed the Golem's victims, I didn't want their blood on my hands. I would find the Golem, expose him, and leave his fate to the courts.

Another case, another solution, another victory. Simple as that.

Know this: I am a fool.

**GLOSSARY/CULTURAL NOTES:**

**On the title:** Or Chadash (the ch is a gutteral sound, as in the Scottish word "loch") is a Hebrew prayer recited by observant Jews every morning, asking God to send a new light to shine on the Jewish people. The words _or chadash_ literally mean "a new light."

**On L being Jewish but not religious:** Jews are an ethnoreligious group, not merely a religious one. Any child of a Jewish mother is considered Jewish, no matter what religion (or lack thereof) he or she practices. Several of the more modernized/liberal streams of Judaism now also accept children of Jewish fathers and Gentile mothers as Jews, provided those children are raised in the Jewish faith, but that's a recent–and controversial–development.

**On L's name:** Lior is pronounced lee-OR and means "I have light" in Hebrew. It's pretty unheard of as a name outside the Jewish community, which is probably why L's father refuses to use it.

**On Light's name:** Yair is pronounced yah-EER and means "he will make light" in Hebrew. In the Tanakh (the Jewish bible), Yair was the name of one of the leaders who "judged Israel" and led the people into battle. Agami is a Jewish surname, found most often in families from Israel.

**The Golem:** According to Jewish folklore, back in the 16th century, Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague used his mystical knowledge of Creation to create a nigh-indestructible humanoid servant (called a golem) out of clay, whose job was to defend the Jewish ghetto against antisemitic attacks. Eventually, the golem became uncontrollable, and Rabbi Loew was forced to deactivate it by erasing a single Hebrew letter from its forehead (changing the word _emet_, meaning "truth," to _meit_, meaning "dead"). Afterwards, the clay remains of the golem were stored in the attic of the Altneuschul (Old New Synagogue) in Prague, where according to legend they remain to this day.


	2. Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

The first deduction was simple: whatever else he was, the Golem was almost certainly a Jew.

Even as I write this, I can hear you scoff. "Even I could tell that," you're thinking. (As I said, predictable.) People like to believe detective work is fiendishly complex, a bunch of intellectual sorcerers conjuring detailed criminal profiles from a single stain. This is nonsense. Wild leaps of logic make for dramatic tales, but I can assure you they don't solve cases. A man who hears hoofbeats in the American Heartland and declares it the sound of zebras is a moron, not a genius, even if he proves correct. Which there is a greater than 99% probability he won't.

Know this: I am not a magician.

True deduction is not a trick, and it is rarely the stuff of great television. Rather, it is a systematic process of elimination, a gradual ruling out of suspects until only one remains. _That _is my talent, not mind-reading. Banal or obvious as it seems, that first deduction reduced the pool of suspects from the entire world population besides myself, around 7 billion, to less than 14 million—still a large pool, but a 99.8% reduction nonetheless. The fact that even you could make that leap doesn't render the results any less impressive. It simply makes _you_ more impressive than you believed.

A nice thought, don't you agree?

That said, there was more thought behind my deduction than it may appear to you. Though the Golem's choice of victims suggested a Jewish perpetrator, there are other philosemitic groups—particularly certain Christian evangelical sects—who could conceivably have been behind the killings. What eliminated them from my consideration was twofold. First, a member of such a group would undoubtedly turn his efforts against perceived enemies of his own faith as well, yet the Golem showed no such interest. So long as the world's abortion providers and so-called activist judges remained untouched, the probability of an evangelical Golem remained minimal, at best.

Second, and more compelling, the Golem's killings inevitably stopped for more than twenty-five hours from Friday to Saturday night, a meaningless timespan to Christians but a meaningful one—Shabbat, the holy Sabbath—to Jews. It is here, perhaps, that the distinction between my mind and yours will become clear. Where other investigators saw only a curious trend in the Golem's pattern of killings, I found confirmation not only that the Golem was Jewish, but that he was a religiously observant Jew living in or around a city in the American Central Standard Time Zone.

How? Simple, really. Since Shabbat observance begins on Friday night eighteen minutes before sundown and ends approximately twenty-five hours later, comparing the Golem's inactivity period to local sundown times allowed me to pinpoint his time zone—a time zone which spans only the three countries of North America. Demographic probability, coupled with the fact that the Golem's victims were disproportionately American, made it a near certainty that the Golem was based in the United States. Furthermore, the fact that the Golem took any notice of Shabbat indicated that he was no mere cultural or secular Jew, which further limited the places he might live to areas with established observant communities, where he would be able to practice the communal obligations of his faith. Strange, perhaps, that a man who could so casually break the Sixth Commandment would so scrupulously keep the Fourth—like a drug addict refusing sushi out of fear for his health—but such is the human mind, religious or not. We are predictable, not logical. The two are not the same.

But I digress.

Deduction itself is not a trick, but I am not above using tricks to further deduction. Narrowing down the Golem's location to the Central Standard Time Zone persuaded the president to give me free rein and any resources I might need to investigate, but it wasn't enough. I needed to narrow the field further. And that's where a certain obscure death row inmate named Lind L. Tailor came in.

Ah, yes. You remember him, don't you? Depending on where you live, perhaps you even watched the live broadcast. Or, rather, broadcasts. With the full force of the government at my disposal, persuading Tailor to participate was a simple matter of offering him a deal: he would impersonate **_L_** on television, call out the Golem for his crimes, drop an antisemitic slur against him, and threaten to bring him to justice. If Tailor remained alive after repeating this performance for each city in the time zone with at least one Orthodox or Conservative synagogue, his sentence would be commuted to life imprisonment. If not, his societal debt would be paid. Meanwhile, I would remain at home, unseen and anonymous, waiting to pounce when—and if—the Golem took the bait, revealing to me which city was his base.

It wasn't a perfect plan, of course. Although the speech I wrote for Tailor claimed the broadcast was worldwide, the more times we had to repeat the performance for different metro areas, the greater the likelihood that the truth—that the broadcasts were not global, but being repeated in different localized areas—would spread online and warn off my quarry. Furthermore, many observant Jews shun television and the internet entirely, though the deaths of several antisemitic bloggers made it unlikely that the Golem was among them.

But even if the ploy failed to catch the Golem's location, it would succeed in misleading him as to my name and appearance, making it easier to stalk him without his knowing. Whatever the outcome, I couldn't lose—and as it happens, I won.

The first broadcast aired in Chicago, the largest Jewish population center in the time zone, and the second in Minneapolis, the second largest. I must say, despite his rather obvious faults of domestic homicide and overall stupidity, Tailor's acting was marvelous. Even I nearly believed him. More importantly, the Golem did. In the middle of our broadcast to the third largest Jewish population center, Milwaukee, Lind L. Tailor dropped dead of a heart attack on live television.

It was then, though I didn't know it, that I addressed Yair Agami for the first time.

"I can't believe it. I tested it just in case, but I never thought it could actually be true...Golem, it seems you can kill people without having to be there in person. I wouldn't have been able to believe this if I hadn't just witnessed it. Know this, Golem: if you did indeed kill the Lind L. Tailor on screen, he was in fact a criminal due to be put to death tomorrow. That was not me. But as for **_L_**, he certainly does exist—as my own persona. Now try to kill _me_! Go on then. Kill me, if you can!"

You may have assumed I issued this challenge knowing I was safe. In truth? I didn't. Confident as I may have sounded, it was all an act. Although the fact the Golem had killed only those bloggers who didn't hide behind a pseudonym suggested an inability to kill without a real name, until I hazarded my own life, I had no way to know for sure.

Needless to say, I am not dictating this story as a ghost. But know this: that minute of waiting was the longest of my life.

"So it seems there are people you can't kill. Thanks for the hint. As a reward, I'll tell you one more thing: we lied about this being a live worldwide broadcast. This announcement is currently only being broadcast in southeastern Wisconsin. I know you're in Milwaukee. I know you're a Jew. And soon enough, I'll know your name, as well. To be honest, I never thought it would go this smoothly. Golem, it appears it won't be long before I can sentence you to death. I'm curious to know your true motives behind this, but I guess that can wait until I've caught you. Let's meet again soon."

One click, and the bold, black **_L_** vanished from the airwaves. I pushed away my voice-scrambling microphone, leaned back in my chair, and smiled.

7 billion to 14 million to less than 24,000, step by careful step. That's detective work. That's deduction. That's what I do.

Did.

Know this: I hate this story.

**GLOSSARY/CULTURAL NOTES:**

**On the title:** Or Chadash (the ch is a gutteral sound, as in the Scottish word "loch") is a Hebrew prayer recited by observant Jews every morning, asking God to send a new light to shine on the Jewish people. The words _or chadash_ literally mean "a new light."

**On being Jewish but not religious:** Jews are an ethnoreligious group, not merely a religious one. Any child of a Jewish mother is considered Jewish, no matter what religion (or lack thereof) he or she practices. Several of the more modernized/liberal streams of Judaism now also accept children of Jewish fathers and Gentile mothers as Jews, provided those children are raised in the Jewish faith, but that's a recent–and controversial–development.

**On L's name:** Lior is pronounced lee-OR and means "I have light" in Hebrew. It's pretty unheard of as a name outside the Jewish community, which is probably why L's father refuses to use it.

**On Light's name:** Yair is pronounced yah-EER and means "he will make light" in Hebrew. In the Tanakh (the Jewish bible), Yair was the name of one of the leaders who "judged Israel" and led the people into battle. Agami is a Jewish surname, found most often in families from Israel.

**The Golem:** According to Jewish folklore, back in the 16th century, Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague used his mystical knowledge of Creation to create a nigh-indestructible humanoid servant (called a golem) out of clay, whose job was to defend the Jewish ghetto against antisemitic attacks. Eventually, the golem became uncontrollable, and Rabbi Loew was forced to deactivate it by erasing a single Hebrew letter from its forehead (changing the word _emet_, meaning "truth," to _meit_, meaning "dead"). Afterwards, the clay remains of the golem were stored in the attic of the Altneuschul (Old New Synagogue) in Prague, where according to legend they remain to this day.

**Shabbat:** Because the biblical account of creation describes the days as "there was evening and there was morning" rather than the other way around, days on the Jewish calendar last from sundown to sundown. Thus, the seventh, Sabbath day lasts from sundown Friday to after sundown on Saturday night. During that time, observant Jews are forbidden from engaging in 39 different categories of labor, including sewing, cooking, lighting fires/turning on electronics, and writing—which would obviously prevent a _shomer shabbos_ (Shabbat-observant) Kira from using a Death Note on Shabbat!

**On the numbering of the Ten Commandments:** Although Christians and Jews both refer to "the Ten Commandments," Jews and various Christian sects differ on how those commandments should be numbered. By the Jewish reckoning, which L follows here, "Keep/Remember the Sabbath day" is the fourth commandment, and "Do not murder" ("kill," as it is commonly rendered, is in fact a mistranslation of the Hebrew) is the sixth. It is also worth noting that, in Judaism, the Ten Commandments are merely ten commandments among many—613, to be precise.


End file.
